NVIDIA has been on a roll lately with their market capitalization and share valuation, which could very well send the company soaring past the $100 billion dollar mark today. Whether or not that happens (and if it does, it will be a historical milestone for the company), NVIDIA's growth of almost $25 billion dollars since May 13th is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

The "sudden" market valuation on NVIDIA comes on the heels of the company's strong graphics execution and increasingly entrenched position in the high performance GPU computing market for machine learning. The company's Volta architecture, which was showcased by Jensen Huang at their GTC keynote on May 10th, boosted confidence in the company significantly. Since then, the company's market cap has increased from the $75 billion dollar it was at shortly after GTC, towards its $96.31 billion rated market cap today. More recently, with the recent rise of the crypto wave craze, NVIDIA's GPUs have been talked about as real alternatives to AMD's previously (and perhaps hurtful for the company) grasp on this kind of workloads.

Recently, new miners optimized for NVIDIA's Pascal architecture have been making waves in the market, and there's even been a recently-launched NVIDIA-based mining station. There have even been analysts' articles detailing how more efficient NVIDIA cards are in mining, in a purely $/W perspective, even if they aren't the fastest yet. Much like AMD has been reaping the benefits of market and customer recognition for their cards' mining prowess, so does NVIDIA stand to gain, and the soaring shares from the company in the last few days could culminate in the company crossing the $100 billion threshold much sooner than expected.

Let's hope AMD to go over 100 billions in 1-2 years also. For a simple reason. If we have 3 companies with market valuation over 100 billions killings each other (Intel, Nvidia and AMD), just imagine what this could mean in GPU and CPU markets.

There's not really anything that a reasonable person can find to say negatively about Nvidia financially. They've been hitting home runs for quite a while now. They've been unopposed in this generation's mid range to upper midrange GPU market for a year now and of course completely own the high end GPU market. They plan to bring Volta either late this year or early next year and even if Vega comes in somewhere around the 1080 Ti I'm convinced that Volta will take a big lead until AMD can bring Navi a year or so afterwards most likely.

I was saying a few months ago that this would be their last year enjoying being lonely on the top in every market they are active, but the delays of Vega and AMD's APUs gives them extra time. Also Vega doesn't look like a threat. They don't seem to have any problems in the datacenter market from Intel, or Qualcomm, or someone else either and I don't know if there is anyone threatening them in the autonomous car market. The only threat I can see is Google and their TPU. That's "Tensor Processing Unit", not TechPowerUp. :p

64K said:I don't see anything that can hold Nvidia back at this point.

Their only danger is incumbency, and if they get cornered on a product by AMD ala Zen & Intel.

I don't think that will happen, but what I think will happen is plenty of clouds will be looking at Zen already, and with the demand for GPU compute, will also be outfitting their clusters with GPGPU - and thats where an Nvidia unwilling to sacrifice its margins may get skewered somewhat by an AMD with Vega.

john_ said:The only threat I can see is Google and their TPU. That's "Tensor Processing Unit", not TechPowerUp. :p

While it's extremely powerful (because being developed specifically for machine learning so no hardware for texture processing) the problem with TPU is they're very limited for Tensorflow (Google's own deep learning library), meanwhile with CUDA you can run most of popular deep learning library, including Tensorflow. And don't forget the fact that you can't buy TPU on the retail market :D

rtwjunkie said:Eventually NVIDIA will get caught unawares with their pants down, just like Intel did recently. It happens, and is only a matter of when.

The one thing that stands out is that the last high end card (Fury X) was a competent and in some cases, faster card (as it should have been for it's hardware heavy design). I genuinely think that Nvidia are forging on to maintain a lead over product cycles and that they do expect Vega to have some impact on their profitability. The common sense business plan for Nvidia is to try to get Volta out asap so that by the time Navi comes along, Volta will be refined and in Titan Volta V2 condition (i.e. full blown GV102, max cores and speeds).
AMD's GPU's have always been powerful so I think it unlikely Nvidia would be caught off guard. Intel on the other hand (I think again, just my opinion) did not expect to see Ryzen perform as competently as it did and they certainly weren't expecting 'Threadripper' (awful name, sound like a sewing accident). Please note - I dont say Intel are scared! - just caught off guard a bit.